Linus Torvalds - a classic example of the love-it-or-hate-it type of person. Brilliant programmer, of course, and the father of one of the most extraordinary software projects in the world, but sometimes, he can be utterly arrogant any annoying, yet the other moment completely sensible and utterly spot-on in his statements. CBR listed the ten best Linus Torvalds quotes.

Can you be more specific what you don't like in the Linux kernel? I think you're wrong, I think Linus is a great architect, but the kernel is quite old large general low-level piece of software, and that means it can be a lot complicated. I think you're confusing ugliness from complexity and ugliness from bad design.

It's a huge monolithic "hacked" piece of SW when it should have been an "engineered" piece of SW.